


A Treatise on Why Gin Ichimaru Sucks It Big

by jtjenna (pornographicpenguin)



Category: Bleach
Genre: Birthday, F/M, Gen, Vomit Mention, alcohol use, this is really gen tbh, toshiro hitsugaya is a Good Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 06:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3477683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pornographicpenguin/pseuds/jtjenna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On September 29th, Matsumoto gets drunk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Treatise on Why Gin Ichimaru Sucks It Big

**Author's Note:**

> title helpfully supplied by the father of tumblr user sinistercacaphony, who happens to know shit all about bleach
> 
> also fair warning i have no idea how this would actually fit into the canon timeline but i'm just gonna roll w it

The first one bring it up is Hinamori.

Rangiku doesn’t actually remember herself until Hinamori brings it to her attention.  Her birthday hadn’t happened to fall at a time when anyone had the time to be an actual person for the last three or four years.  It had been all training and fighting and peace treaties, everyone so caught up in the cause that her birthday had passed without notice.  Rangiku hadn’t even realized until Hinamori was standing in front of her, smile just barely reaching her eyes.

“Happy Birthday, Matsumoto-san.”  Hinamori holds out an envelope, so lacking in wrinkles and folds it seems to be out of place in her hand.

Rangiku takes it.  It’s a gift certificate to some facial thing that Rangiku’s probably not going to use anytime in the next ten years.  She’s tempted to say something about how Hinamori looks like she needs it, with the bags under her eyes, but keeps her mouth shut.

It is September 29th, isn’t it?  She runs it over in her mind, the days of the week, counting up from last Monday.  Some part of her hopes she could just smile and say, “Nope, not today!” and wave off Hinamori’s apologies for getting the day wrong with an easygoing hand.  But it is, indeed, the correct date.

Rangiku smiles.  She thought she had finally gotten over this.

“Thanks, Momo,” she says, but in her head she’s thinking about the sun beating down on her skin, the itch of sand on her hands and feet, and how the first swallow of food after weeks without hit her stomach like a rock, something she needed so badly but made her want to vomit.

It crosses her mind that it’s a fair comparison to how she feels about Gin.

“Oh, anytime, Matsumoto-san.  It’s just been one of the first chances any of us have gotten the chance to celebrate any birthdays, with all the chaos…”  Rangiku sees her eyes slip off to the side, fixing on the floral-print vase in the corner of Toshiro’s office.  Looks like Hinamori isn’t over it, either -- though Rangiku doesn’t need the anxious look on her face or the miles-away glaze over her eyes to know that.  The fact that she still thinks about Aizen is written plain as day in the bags under her eyes, the way her fingers still tremble.  It’s been years, and in all the ways that matter she’s still exactly the same as the day Aizen left.  “And I thought it would be a nice thing to do,” she finishes.  Rangiku thinks Hinamori’s staring at her neck, now.  “Even if it’s not much….”

She would probably understand, Rangiku thinks.  She’d get the way that the thought of Gin’s smile, the thin strands of his hair, or his stupid accent makes her way to pull her skin off her own bones.  She’d probably look at her own hands when Rangiku told her that Gin had chosen her birthday for her, and Rangiku would be able to see the pain in her eyes, the slump of her shoulders.

“No, it’s great!” Rangiku says with a smile.  It feels like plastic stretched over her lips.  “Thanks so much for remembering!”

 

\---

 

Rangiku downs the third shot of sake down like it’s nothing more than a sip of water, and places the glass back on the table with a noisy clatter.  Hisagi doesn’t bat an eyelash.

“What even is a birthday, anyway,” she says, her lips already starting to go that funny kind of numb they do when she gets drunk, “if it’s not the day you’re born on?”

Hisagi scoffs.  Rangiku lays her head on the table with a long sigh.  She lets her eyes roam over the sharp curves of the muscles of his arms, the strong line of his jaw.  He’s hot, and she tries to get herself to think about that instead of the way Gin’s hands had curled over her hips or the way he had kissed her with too much tongue.  “I was the wrong person to ask out if you wanted to talk philosophy.”

Rangiku closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose.  She grunts.  After a second she feels something smooth and cold brush the back of her hand.  As she lets her eyes flutter open, she identifies it as a beer.

“Thanks,” she says, and it comes out a lot more haggard than she would’ve wanted it to.

Hisagi doesn’t respond.  Rangiku watches as he takes a sip of his own beer, and decides to push herself upright and follow suit.

“So, your birthday is today, huh?”

Only in the paperwork sense.  Only in the sense that it was the day she had celebrated it on for most of her life.  “In every way that matters,” she says.

Hisagi makes a noise of acknowledgment, drumming his fingers on the edge of his glass.  Rangiku stares.

“You wanna talk about it?” he asks.  It sounds a bit like he’s choking on his own tongue.

“Not really,” she says, but she can feel the alcohol sitting heavy in her stomach, the lightheaded buzz in her skull.  “I’m probably going to anyway, though.”

Hisagi grunts again.

“What’s up with your birthday?”  Rangiku asks, tracing her index finger around the lip of her glass.

“Huh?”

“Like...who chose it for you?”  Most people from Rukongai had their names chosen for them, whether it was by friends or family or the people at the academy who assign you a random date if you don’t already have one.

Hisagi doesn’t look at her, stares straight ahead to the bottles lined up behind the bar.  “I chose it myself.”

“Oh,” Rangiku says.

A long moment passes in silence.  “You?”

“Gin chose it for me.”

This time, it’s Hisagi’s turn to say, “Oh.”  It’s not toned with surprise, like Rangiku’s had been, but understanding with a little bit of resignation.  Gin had never sounded like that, not to her.  He had always understood everything, always been one step ahead of her -- or at least pretended to be when he wasn’t.  Rangiku wished it had grated on her nerves.  “That sucks.”

“Mn,” she says, eloquently.

Rangiku hadn’t used to count the days before she met him.

She lets her head rest on the bar again.

 

\---

 

“Whenever -- I got mad,” the words spill out of Rangiku’s mouth like the last drops of alcohol dribbling out of a tipped glass, “he used to tell me how pretty I was.”  Hisagi looks deeply uncomfortable, but also like he’s too drunk to care, at this point.  Rangiku isn’t sure how someone can look that way, but Hisagi definitely looks it.  “Which was stupid, because it was like -- the dumbest attempt at manipulation in the book.”  Her bangs are falling in front of her eyes.  “I can’t believe I let him get away with it.”

Hisagi’s shoulders are stiff, but his cheeks are flushed.

“I used to let him do all sorts of things that I shouldn’t have.”

Rangiku blinks long and deliberate, like it’ll clear away the tingling behind her eyes.  Hisagi continues to look deeply uncomfortable.

“Do you ever think you could’ve...said something?” Rangiku asks.  “To make them change their minds?”

Hisagi makes a noise low in his throat.  Rangiku doesn’t quite know what it means.  “It’s old history, Matsumoto.”  A few moments pass in silence.  Rangiku doesn’t respond.  From this angle she can see the 69 tattooed onto his left cheek.  She’d always wondered what inspired him to do that.  “But yeah,” he says.  “I do.”

“Me too,” she says, though after a moment she realizes the clarification wasn’t really necessary.

"It's like -- " she watches the rugged edges of his Adam's apple bob as he swallows. "I used to think things like 'what would my Captain think if I did this?' and now I -- I don't even know."  His fists tighten around the base of his glass, knuckles going white. Rangiku half-expects it to shatter.  "I've had years to think about it, and I still don't get it."

Silence falls. In the background, a man laughs boisterously, loud enough to work its way over the white noise of the bar.  She doesn't know how to respond to that, has no idea what the purpose behind it must be or what she wants to get across, so she simply says what comes to her mind. “The worst part is, I -- “  Rangiku swallows around the lump in her throat, and some small part of her chastises herself for being so maudlin in front of another person.  The rest of her tells that part to shut the hell up.  “I wasn’t really surprised.”

Hisagi blinks.  “What?”

“Not like I knew, but…” she trails off, twirling the ends of her bangs around a finger.  “He was always doing shit without telling me.  After the fact, the more I thought about it...the more it kind of made sense.”

She glances up at Hisagi, who she finds gazing down at her with surprisingly emotive eyes.  It’s surprising because the guy never got particularly emotional, even when he drank.  Crazy, yeah, but never particularly emotional.  She once saw him hurl a table across a twenty-foot room for no apparent reason with only a cold glint in his eye.  In the morning he had woken up all of the drunk people to personally apologize.

“Not in like a, a logical way.”  She raises a hand up to her chest.  “But here.”  She pats herself a few times before she finds herself content to just leave her hand resting on her cleavage.  Hisagi probably won’t mind.

“I never got that.”  He gazes down into the depths of his glass.  Weirdly contemplative.  Rangiku wonders what that looks like.  “Captain Tousen always seemed so...logical.  Rigid.”  He crosses his arms over the edge of the bar.  “Too rigid, I guess.”

Rangiku bites her lip.  She tries very, very hard not to make a dick joke.

“Kinda like his dick, huh?”

She did try.

Hisagi gives her a look that’s somewhere between disgusted and bewildered before his lips curl into a weird laugh.  “You’re ridiculous,” he says.

“You know it.”

In the next few moments -- Rangiku's not entirely sure how it happens, but she finds her head on Hisagi's shoulder, and thoughts of Gin start to evaporate like dew hanging heavy on the leaves of plants under the gentle morning sun.

Getting drunk had been a good solution, she decides.

 

\---

 

Kira comes and picks Hisagi up eventually, shuffling over to the two of them through the low, dark ruckus of the bar.  

Over Hisagi’s shoulder, he gives Rangiku a neutral look that she thinks is meant to be irritated, but the moment Hisagi spots him and throws an arm around his shoulders, shouting, “Hey, Izuru!” all of the taut and worried little bits wash out of his features.  She watches fondly as Hisagi tugs him close until Kira is nestled in the crook of his arm, Hisagi a good foot taller than him from atop the barstool.  "Thanks for the time, Matsumoto!" he says, just a bit too loudly for her being only a couple feet away from him.

"Anytime," Rangiku replies, waving a hand at him.  She feels a bit like all the molecules in her body are vibrating pleasantly, becoming more and more like air each second.

"Yeah," Hisagi says as he slips down, then holds an aggressive peace sign out at her.  “Keep your spirits up, okay?”

“My _spirits_ ,” she says, raising her empty glass at him.

Hisagi grins.  “Yeah,” he say in an oddly aggressive manner, then repeats once more, “Yeah.”  He pulls Kira closer for emphasis, sending the guy tripping over his own feet in the process.

Gazing up distractedly at Hisagi, Kira asks, “Would you like us to walk you home, Matsumoto?” He’s got a hand pressed to Hisagi’s solar plexus, like he’s trying to keep the guy from putting all of his weight on Kira’s shoulders.

“No, I’m fine,” she says, waving a few fingers at him.  A hand.  That’s what that’s called.

Kira frowns.  “Are you sure?  It wouldn’t be too much -- “

“Nah, the Squad Ten barracks are -- “ she gestures loosely in one direction, flapping her wrist for a few seconds until she can think of the word.  “Close.”

Kira continues to frown, the edges of his mouth pulled down in a polite little expression.  “Matsumoto, you’re a little -- “

She rolls her eyes -- or tries to.  She’s not sure how great her coordination is right then, so it might come out more like a weird twitch.  “I’m _fine_ ,” she says.  “‘mma big girl, I can take care of myself.”

Hisagi thunks Kira on the back hard enough that his eyes widen in surprise.  “Let ‘er go, Izuru, she can handle herself.”  He slouches on Kira, leaning his cheek on the top of Kira’s head.  “Could take any of these chumps with a hand tied behind ‘er back.   _And_ drunk.”

“Alright,” Kira relents.  “Alright, go ahead.”

“Thank you,” Matsumoto says, very primly, and slips off the barstool.  She slaps Hisagi on the shoulder a few times on her way out, stumbling a bit here and there.

But she smiles.  Getting drunk had been a _great_ idea.

 

\---

 

Rangiku recants:  getting drunk had been a horrible idea.

She gets back to get quarters at god knows what hour of the night -- she knows she had looked at the clock, but her brain is so scrambled she can barely form full sentences in her head.  And in the dark -- she hadn't been able to find the light switch, collapsed on her bed with a crash that seemed to echo through the entire complex, springs creaking and crying under her, sound rising up through her body like she's not even there.

She doesn't know why it reminds her of Gin, but it does.  There's a small horde of booze stashed in her closet.

She drinks.  More.  Which probably isn't a good idea, considering she's already drunk, but Rangiku never said drunk people were reasonable decision-makers.  

She’s never been one to drown her feelings in drink -- usually she never feels so tumultuous, never had emotions and memories clawing at the inside of her skull like they are tonight.  It’s never been anything that she couldn’t clear from her mind after a hard workout or a well-timed whisper.

There’s something about the dark of the night, she realizes as the sprawls on the floor of her bedroom, a bottle of sake in her lap.  Something about the silence that has loneliness creeping into her bones.  It’s a lingering kind of emptiness, the same kind she found in the mornings she woke up to find Gin mysteriously vanished, the kind of loneliness that made her want to scream  but forced her vocal cords mute.  On days like those she had climbed up onto the roof and watched horse-drawn carriages rumble down the streets kicking up sand, men spitting in the road, and women lingering in the shadows cast by the awnings of buildings.  Occasionally people had shouted up to her, but she had never responded.  

There is something about the quiet that rings through the Squad Ten barracks at these wee hours of the morning that brings to mind Gin’s smile and his voice, the way “Captain Ichimaru” had weighed heavy on her tongue the first time she had used it, the uneasiness that had squirmed low in her stomach whenever he touched her.  She had always ignored it; he had saved her life.  Some part of her desperately wishes she hadn’t.

All she has is sake -- she has to pull out every bottle, set them all out in haphazard patterns on the floor to check -- but she wishes she had something more, something stronger.  Like Vodka; she wishes she had that.  She doesn’t feel nearly comatose enough for where her thoughts are going.

She remembers all the walls and corners of their home in what she had previously classified as perfect, pristine memory, but when she strains she can’t seem to remember the print of their pillows or the shade of their sheets or what tone their mattress had creaked under the two of them.  It had grown familiar, but not familiar enough, and never beloved.  Like a dream, sleeping cold when he had disappeared and his kiss waking her in the wee hours of the night when he returned, no warmer than the nights he was gone.  He had taken her to bed, his fingers inside her, whispering just before she came, “Rangiku,” treacherous, slick and slimy, like he had won some kind of game.

Rangiku rushes to the bathroom and vomits.  

She doesn’t know if it’s the booze or the thoughts of Gin or both, but there’s nothing to empty out of her stomach but booze.  Staring down at the toilet bowl with a frown, she realizes that she is going to have the mother of all hangovers tomorrow morning.  She flushes it, leaning back against the opposite wall.  Darkness descends as she lets her eyes fall shut.  

A part of her wonders if the disgust had been there in the years leading up to Gin’s betrayal, or if it had been a retroactive invention of her own brain.  Rangiku finds she doesn’t wish to know the answer.

At this point, her limbs have gone all tingly and numb, weighing like stones at her sides.  It comes flowing up from her guts like water, or the gushing of blood -- Gin had always kept secrets:  disappearing in the middle of the night, a knowing smile, a hand on her elbow driving her away from particular individuals.  To this day she doesn’t know why he had wanted to become a soul reaper, though she can guess.  He had once whispered something in her ear about the protection it had provided the both of them, that stupid, lilting tone all sing-song in her ear.  It had been a lie.

Gin had lied to her all the time.  Rangiku wonders when she had gained the ability to tell, and what it was that gave him away.  The tilt of his grin or the way the skin around his eyes had never crinkled with a smile.  

At the time, Rangiku kept no secrets.  She has plenty now.

Slowly, she combs the bangs out of her eyes and back behind her ears.  The lights still aren’t on.  She hadn’t thought to flip the switch as she came in.

The sun catching on the fine stands of his hair, Gin had said, “From now on, the day you met me will be your birthday.”

She throws up.  This time, she doesn’t even pretend it’s because of the alcohol.

The sound of the toilet flushing must drown out the noise her door makes as it slides open and the sound of feet padding across the wooden flooring, because she doesn’t hear a thing until Rangiku hears, from the doorway, “What in the world are you doing up this late?”

Toshiro flips on the light with a stern hand just as she says, “Wha’s it fuckin’ look like?”  The light is so bright it makes her eyes water.

He frowns.  “Have you been drinking again?”

She closes her eyes and wipes one of her sleeves over her mouth.  Doesn’t make her tongue taste less like half-digested sake and bile, though.  “No,” she says, sarcastically.  “Not a drip.”

“Drop,” Toshiro says with a low, frustrated sigh.  He takes a few steps into the room, wrinkling his nose -- whether at the smell of alcohol or the stench of vomit, she’s not sure -- and that’s when she notices that he’s still in full uniform, from the pristine white of his his Captain’s haori down to his socks.  

Rangiku squints.  Even her drunken brain can process that information, albeit slowly.  A few seconds later she glances up at him and asks, “Were you working?”

In lieu of an answer, Toshiro makes that boy noise, the same stupid little scoffy one that Ichigo Kurosaki makes on occasion.  She wonders if it has to do with the age or the attitude.  “None of your business,” he says, crouching down next to her.  They don’t touch, but she can feel the material of their clothes brush together and for some reason it soothes the part of her that aches unbearably lonely.  “Isn’t today your birthday?”

It takes Rangiku a solid five seconds to remember that she should probably make an effort to not look like a deer in the headlights when asked that question.  She makes a rough, shrugging motion, accompanied with an equally unintelligible noise.

“Idiot,” Toshiro says.  It has no bite.  “Don’t you know when your own birthday is?”

The day she had met Gin Ichimaru.

Rangiku vomits into the toilet one more time.

She hears Toshiro sigh behind her, and when she raises her head, she realizes that he’s holding her hair out of her face.  Rangiku can’t remember ever being this drunk before.  Maybe it’s not the sheer amount of alcohol, though, but the alcohol plus the misery.

“I had too much to drink,” she says.

“No shit.”  

Rangiku wipes a sleeve over her mouth again.  She doesn’t even want to think about the gross that must be smeared across her chin at this point.

She hadn’t counted the days until she met him.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Rangiku says, turning to face Toshiro.  She smiles.  “This day’s not working for me.”

His eyebrow twitches.  “What?”

“This birthday,” she says.  “Today is a shitty day.”  Swiping her bangs off her forehead like she actually has an ounce of coordination, she finishes, “Better make it the 28th.”  She pauses for a moment before clarifying, “Yesterday.”

“I know what the date is!” Toshiro snaps.  She watches his fists clench in his lap.  “Does this have something to do with why you’re blind drunk, Matsumoto?”

Rangiku blinks.  It’s inappropriate, she knows, not something she would ever want or need to say, but the words come spilling out of her mouth before she can think about them, “Today was the day I met Gin.”

It seems like she blinks and all of a sudden Toshiro’s got his face worked into an ugly scowl, looking kinda like he’s ready for blood to spill.  Preferably at his hands.  “I’m going to kill him,” he says.

Rangiku’s mind trips over a multitude of reactions to that simultaneously, so fast she only feels a jumble of hard elation in her chest and something rank and hissing sink low in her gut.

Toshiro’s feet knock against the floor with a hollow sound.  “I’ll get you the paperwork tomorrow morning.”

Rangiku blinks.  He’s serious.  “You can do that,” she says.

“Of course I can, idiot.”  Still no bite.  Rangiku grins.

It occurs to her that changing her birthday to the day _before_ she met Gin might be petty and purposeless.  The day before the day he was there is still with consideration to him as a person, him as someone who was important to Rangiku.  She’d probably be dead without him.

Still -- the distinction between someone who _is_ important and someone who _was_ important is -- enough.

“Do it,” Rangiku says.

“I already said I would.”  Toshiro rolls his eyes, and holds out a hand.  

Rangiku takes it.  She remembers him saying once, watching fireworks from the roof:   _You just have to believe the date that someone you trust tells you._  Rangiku thinks she’d like to trust herself.  

Toshiro gives her a stern look.  “Now get to bed, Matsumoto.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” she says, a stupid grin painted on her face as she pushes herself to her feet.  “Yes sir.”

“Shut up,” he scoffs.  “I expect you to be up at regular time tomorrow.”

Rangiku groans, throwing a dramatic hand over her chest.  “Isn’t that in like, four hours?”

“Three,” Toshiro says.

“ _Captain_ ,” Rangiku whines.  “That’s not even enough time to get un-drunk!”  She stumbles a little bit on the way to her bed for emphasis, nearly tripping over one of the bottles.  

“Not if you try hard,” Toshiro responds, crossing his arms.  “Besides, you did this to yourself.”

“I’m going through emotional trauma here!”

Toshiro rolls his eyes.

Collapsing down into a sitting position on the edge of her bed, she sticks her tongue out at Toshiro and pulls down one eye.

Totally ignoring her, Toshiro continues, “And I expect these to be gone in the morning.”  He nudges at one of her many, many bottles with his toe.

“Yeah, yeah, out of sight, out of mind, Captain.”

“I meant _throw them away_ ,” he says.  His eyebrow starts twitching again.

“That’s gonna happen, sir.”  Rangiku attempts to make this sound as serious as she can, and fails terribly.

Toshiro sighs, stepping over to the door.  “Just get some rest, Lieutenant.”

Rangiku smiles.  There’s no way Toshiro could see, with his back turned to her, but nevertheless he says, “And stop grinning like an idiot,” before he slams the door tightly shut.

In the morning, Rangiku will stumble over to Toshiro’s office across the hall at some ungodly small hour of the day.  The first thing on her stack of paperwork for that day will in fact be a form with the words “Birth Date Change Request” stamped in blocky text across the top of the page.  In the five lines provided for “Reason for change request,” Rangiku will write only, “Gin Ichimaru sucks ass.”


End file.
